Hello April. How quarterly check-ins can help you achieve your goals

Happy April. The end of the first quarter of 2017, and the start of the next.

In business, the quarterly report is a standard way to share results and track progress. Personally or professionally, quarterly assessments can be valuable tools to see how you’re doing on your goals.

Without a plan, goals are abstract, futuristic, and–sometimes, as a result–hard to achieve. Breaking down big goals into specific smaller steps, setting timelines for those steps and then checking in on what you’ve accomplished can be a good way to hold yourself accountable and ensure you achieve your goals.

The start of April–the end of the Q1 and the start of Q2–is a good time to do that.

Along with looking back, it’s also important to look ahead. What’s next? What adjustments do you need to make? Are you still on track? Have your goals shifted at all?

This is my second year (now my sixth quarter, if you want to be specific) using a Passion Planner. It is a great goal-setting and planning tool. At the end of every month, there’s a reflection. After I answer the questions, I go back to plan I built at the beginning of the year, choose the item I’m going to focus on for the next month, break it down into its smaller pieces, assign deadlines and set checkpoints.

A quarterly assessment is a chance to do that in a little more detail and look at what I want to accomplish over the remainder of the year.

The most memorable part of the last quarter was working with my husband to map out concrete timelines for some things that we’ve been talking about for a long time. As a result of that conversation, we’ve made a few changes, and our goals seem that much closer.

Do you do quarterly reports, either for your business or yourself? How do you stay on track?